OneAID Updates

February 11, 2025

Today’s Key Message

USAID seems to be the playbook for President Trump and Elon Musk’s plan for a rapid and potentially illegal overhaul of the U.S. government. This is being done without Congressional approval and oversight required for those agencies codified by statute. No one is against reform, but what DOGE is doing isn’t reform, it’s taking a sledgehammer to a vital tool of U.S. national security.

ASK: Congress needs to act now on the dismantling of USAID and unfreeze foreign assistance to signal that these actions will not stand. Congress has power of the purse and oversight on reform of agencies codified in statute, not DOGE.

• With announcements over the weekend that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is facing similar destructive actions to those executed in an attempt to dismantle USAID over the last two weeks, and DOGE accessing at least 15 government agencies, it is clear that USAID was just the first stop in this effort.

• USAID has evolved and reformed at the behest of administrations and Congress numerous times over its 65 year history to more effectively serve America’s interests at any given time, and bold reform now is both necessary and feasible.

  • Instead of undertaking a reform effort, working closely with Congress as is required by law, DOGE has taken a “burn it all down, build it back up” approach.

  • This may work for tech firms, but it is a dangerous approach for government institutions that must be accountable to taxpayers and that deliver public goods, not profit.

  • Rep. Bacon (R-NE) put it best in his comments to the Wall Street Journal: “[USAID was] funding a lot of stupid stuff - that’s a fact. But they’re also doing a lot of good stuff too. So you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of taking a sledgehammer, let’s get out the scalpel.”

• If the current DOGE approach being executed by Pete Marocco continues, the United States will lose the expertise and operational systems that are essential to responsibly oversee foreign assistance, along with many valuable programs.

  • This will make it extremely costly if not impossible for the United States to continue to wield foreign assistance as an effective soft power tool in the future and only China and U.S. adversaries will benefit.

• There remains no clear guidance for USAID staff that have been kept on or whose access to government systems was reinstated due to the court order last week. There are now a few thousand staff back online, ready to work, but who have not received guidance on where to focus their working hours.

  • Meanwhile, staff need direction and a mandate to enact the urgently needed, life-saving work that the waivers, approved by Secretary Rubio, allow to move forward.

• There continues to be confusion on the status of waivers, rescinded funds, and contract and program terminations. Many of the contracts/programs that USAID missions have been told to terminate fall under congressional mandates such as audits and oversight programs, and therefore cannot be terminated without congressional approval. Staff are now being told to cancel these contracts and programs that are meant to help USAID be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.

Current Impact

American Economy and Jobs

• In just three weeks, 11,322 Americans across 43 states have lost their jobs, with the estimated potential job loss to come likely to be over 52,000. Globally, 51,848 have been confirmed lost so far with the total likely to be over 100,000.

• From farmers in Kansas to NGO workers in North Carolina, the Foreign Assistance Stop Work order is hurting American workers and the U.S. economy. The loss of USAID means U.S. states will lose an estimated $3.34b in direct economic benefit.

• On February 10, the National Democratic Institute furloughed 60% of its staff due to the foreign assistance freeze. This is just one instance of a critical USAID partner having to take such a drastic step after just three weeks after the stop work orders were issued.

• American farmers supply over 40% of the food aid USAID delivers, and on average, the U.S. government purchases $2.1 billion in crops from American farmers each year. This is now completely in jeopardy.

Humanitarian Assistance

• On February 10th, the USAID Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published a report concluding that $8.2bn in obligated but undisbursed humanitarian assistance is at risk of diversion, spoilage, or other misconduct as a result of the assistance pause, other directives and unclear instructions, and staff reductions. Key findings include:

  • USAID’s partner-vetting unit, responsible for ensuring aid doesn’t fund terrorist organizations, has been shut down. This increases the risk of aid being diverted to groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS. USAID can no longer effectively vet new or existing aid contracts, creating major security concerns.

  • Food aid worth $489 million is sitting at ports, in transit, or in warehouses, at risk of spoilage, theft, or diversion.

  • Over 500,000 metric tons of food sourced from U.S. farmers remains stuck due to unclear funding policies.

  • Third-party monitoring (TPM) contracts were suspended, leaving USAID unable to verify if aid is being delivered properly.

  • Staff reductions have severely limited USAID’s ability to investigate fraud, waste, or abuse in humanitarian programs

  • Reports suggest that humanitarian aid in high-risk areas like Gaza, Syria, and Ukraine is vulnerable to theft and mismanagement

• Because of the U.S. foreign assistance freeze and despite humanitarian waivers, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), will have to suspend programs serving hundreds of thousands of people in 20 countries despite having funding from other donor countries available.

  • “The impact of this will be felt severely by the most vulnerable, from deeply neglected Burkina Faso, where we are the only organization supplying clean water to the 300,000 trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo, to war-torn Sudan, where we support nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur providing daily subsidized bread to hundreds of thousands of hunger-stricken people,” NRC said in a statement.

National Security

• In the absence of USAID leadership and influence, vulnerable people around the world will turn to others for help, not only China and Russia, but potentially violent extremist organizations.

• With the foreign assistance freeze, in just two weeks, U.S. adversaries like China have stepped in to fill the void of USAID, this is often done through exploitative and dangerous loans versus grants that can lead to increased instability and economic collapse in the longer term:

  • In Nepal, Chinese officials have reportedly signaled to the Nepalese government that Beijing is willing to step in to replace USAID’s void with development funding of its own

  • Despite its strategic importance to the United States in the Indo-Pacific, Officials in the Cook Islands have said they expect the withdrawal of USAID from the region to provide an opening for China.

  • In Colombia, which received around $385 million in USAID funding in 2024, non-governmental organizations that received USAID funding say the Chinese government is interested in putting up money to help fill the void.

Health

• Confirmed cases of Ebola in Uganda have now increased to seven from the initial two and are no longer being contained by American foreign aid and technical expertise. All 10 confirmed cases of Marburg virus (similar to Ebola) in Tanzania have died. Ebola and other related viruses can quickly spread to become another pandemic if USAID is not present. USAID was responsible for containing the 2013-2015 Ebola outbreak, preventing a global pandemic from occurring, and saving millions of lives.

• HIV/AIDS (PEPFAR):

  • Based on FY2024 dispensing data, 222,333 people pick up new supplies of ARVs every single day, 365 days per year. So, 222,233 people lose access to treatment every day that the stop work order is in effect. Of these, 7,445 are children under the age of 15 losing access to treatment for each day. (amfAR)

  • For each day pregnant women with HIV go without treatment due to the stop work order, there will be 1,471 new HIV infections among infants. They will likely go undiagnosed because infant HIV testing services are suspended. (amfAR)

• Malaria:

  • The abrupt suspension of USAID funding has immediate implications for life-saving programs worldwide. The "stop work" order affects approximately 1,400 activities across 133 countries and regions, including those under the President’s Malaria Initiative. In 2023, this initiative delivered 37 million insecticide-treated bed nets, a critical tool in malaria prevention. The cessation of such programs threatens to reverse progress made in malaria control (Source).

  • One implementing partner that receives USAID funding has more than one million insecticide-treated bed nets in a warehouse in Ethiopia that, along with antimalarial drugs and diagnostics, are going to waste because they are not allowed to deploy them anymore. (Nature)

• After one week of the freeze, 912,720 women and girls have been denied care, and after one month, the figure will reach about four million. Over the course of the full 90-day review period, 11.7 million women and girls will be denied essential care (Source: Guttmacher).